Talk Islam

Latest Updates: women’s health RSS

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  johnpi 11:26 pm on December 14, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: girls' health (3), healthcare (8), HPV, immigrant persecution (12), Immigration Reform (2), public health (6), sexually transmitted disease, US health care (8), US immigration (11), women's health

  The HPV vaccine mandate for immigrant women has been eliminated.

  This week the reproductive justice movement is celebrating a significant victory. Effective December 14, immigrant women and girls will no longer be forced to get Gardasil, a vaccine developed by Merck and Company to prevent transmission of the strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) linked to cervical cancer. This marks the reversal of a harmful and discriminatory rule originally put in place in July 2008 by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that took away the ability of immigrant women and girls to make informed choices of whether or not to get the Gardasil injection.

  The regimen of shots for HPV, which is sexually transmitted, costs $360, creating additional financial and legal barriers for green card applicants. Also,

  …progressive groups acknowledged that the mandatory use of a medical procedure on a targeted population when it is not required of the general population is discriminatory. Like their U.S. citizen counterparts, all prospective immigrant women should have the opportunity to make an informed decision about their use of the HPV vaccine, weighing both the potential costs and health benefits of using the vaccine.

  The vaccine is recommended but not required for the general population.

   

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  johnpi 10:22 am on November 12, 2009 | 7 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: fasting (11), food (31), food restrictions, girls' health (3), halal food (5), health (30), health risks (4), modesty (11), obesity (2), public health (6), women's health

  We don’t blog alot about health issues here, and for Western Muslims, I don’t think anybody who does health studies ever looks at us specifically in a way that it would be a ‘Muslim’ story, but there are huge trends in the larger society and it’s fair to ask how much or whether we are a part of them, and how much a specific ‘Muslim lifestyle’ plays into those trends.

  Studies suggest overweight kids are coronary time bombs.

  Russell Pate was driving through a neighborhood one late afternoon when he noticed something odd.

  He couldn’t hear the sounds of children playing. No jump rope patter. No squeals of a bike’s brake. No crack of a bat — just silence.

  The streets were deserted because the neighborhood kids were cocooned in their homes, Pate says. It was a scene he’s seen over and over again.

  “Now you can drive through entire neighborhoods where you know there are a lot of young kids there and hardly see any of them out,” says Pate, an American Heart Association spokesman.
  ….

  A study released last November at a Heart Association conference found that the neck arteries in obese and overweight children were similar to those of 45-year-olds. The children in the study also had “abnormal cholesterol” and were said to be at high risk for heart disease in the future.

  The story cites television, video games, the obsession with testing and fast food as culprits. Here in the West, Muslims are usually well-off and well-fed, but despite (or perhaps because of) fasting, food and modesty restrictions, are Western Muslims fat?

   
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  johnpi 8:14 am on June 8, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: girls athletics, girls sports and Muslims, girls' health (3), hymen (3), Muslims and virginity (5), virginity (7), women's health

  The hymen curse:

  Women are taught that our hymens are a secret: a gift representing our virginities that we should never share with anyone but our husbands. Instead of being a gift, however, it really functions more as a curse. Our early lives are often shaped around the hymen and its protection: we may be kept from playing sports, using tampons, having male friends, and riding horses for fear that our hymens may break (or be broken) and our virginities rendered void.

  One of my daughter’s new good friends is a 9-year-old Iraqi refugee girl (about 6 months in US). When their family comes over to my house I let the kids ride the bikes I have here. The girl loves riding bikes, but she is only allowed to ride the little kids’ bike where her knees are nearly hitting the handlebars, rather than one of the larger bikes that is more appropriate to her size. The family was gifted bikes for the father and brother, but not for her. I was wondering if this may be the issue.

   
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  johnpi 8:08 pm on May 6, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: exercise (3), hijab (75), hijabis (5), mental health (10), mental illness (6), patriarchy (8), women's health

  Related to my previous post, a teen Muslimah ventures into the realm of media criticism and expresses a complaint about the lack of certain images of hijabis on the web:

  Why doesn’t there seem to be action hijabis on google?! Why do all hijabis have to be posing? I’ve been googling hijabi w/hijab flying in the wind since forever. But there’s nothing! Or a hijabi running or jumping or cleaning or playing or eating…

   
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  johnpi 7:48 pm on May 6, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: exercise (3), mental health (10), mental illness (6), patriarchy (8), women's health

  Women’s sports clubs have become widely popular in Saudi Arabia as a culture of women’s fitness has taken hold. But the Saudi government now says it will close all of the unlicensed private operations down, leaving only expensive clubs in medical facilities.

  Blogger Saudiwoman, who was misquoted and misidentified by the Arab News hacks in the article linked above, writes about this new development (I’ve edited one sentence in this quote for grammar and clarity.)

  Women only sports clubs have been popping up everywhere and their fees are now within reach of the average woman. They offer aerobic classes, self-defense and even salsa dancing. However they have no legal licensing umbrella because according to the government all forms of exercise are for men only. So the owners of these clubs get a license for a salon or a child activity center and then expand from there. Ultra conservatives are dead against these establishments because they believe that they lead Saudi women to sin through the influence of and interaction with unsavory feminists, and sometimes they even go so far as to claim lesbians work there and frequent the clubs (according to the muttawa sexually repressed wild imagination). Moreover they believe that exercise goes against femininity and that it is an exclusively manly domain.

  “Exercise goes against femininity” – yeah, sure. Exercise is important to overall mental health and helps stave off or improve control over mental illness. Such ‘ultra-conservatives’ must consider madness and poor mental health to be expressions of “normal” feminity, since they are more likely to be present among the women in their families who, no doubt, are prohibited from exercise.